People who are new to using Facebook chat may think that Facebook emoticons have been an intergral part of the social network since its inception more than five years ago. This is, in fact, not the case – and the entire system for live communication via chat was actually not a part of Facebook until much more recently. Where did it come from? Why did they choose to add it? What is the history of the Facebook chat emoticons? Let’s take a look.
Facebook Emoticons
Five years ago, the social networking scene was completely different. Myspace dominated the internet in terms of connecting people to their friends, family members and colleagues – however it was not completely integrated into our lives, the way Facebook is now. The reason for this was a number of key mistakes, committed by Myspace and their partners over a two year period, which allowed Facebook the chance to enter the market and then (as we have seen) dominate it.
The first error that Myspace made was to almost completely ignore the needs of its users and the reasons why they had come to the social network in the first place. Communication is one of the key reasons that the internet has gone from being a military help to the single biggest invention in the last one hundred years. The connection between homes and people are now unbreakable, and every day it becomes more and more integrated. This communication was something that Myspace offered when it was first made available to users – the abililty to give and receive information to people who you knew (either in real life or online). This changed though.
The site became a popularity contest – a way for people with low self esteem to prove their popularity by adding hundreds of fake friends who they didn’t really know to their profiles. Another mistake was that the users were given the ability to upload custom CSS files to their pages, which could affect the layout. Chaos ensued, with member pages frequently breaking or proving unreadable to a number of browsers and users. People wanted to go back to the simplicity of being able to communicate with their friends without all of the bells, whistles, gadgets and plugins.
Facebook emoticons
Enter Facebook. The clean design and clear navigation was like a gift from heaven for the disillusioned Myspace users, and they signed up in their millions. What had begun as a tool for University classmates to talk with each other and plan their social calendars had become a platform for everyone to share photos, messages and eventually chat.
When chat was introduced to the site nearly two years ago, there were concerns that the size of Facebook (which now dominated the social networking world) would mean that any browser based addon would be slow and bulky, but it proved to be quite the opposite. The lightweight client proved extremely popular as it was tested thoroughly in beta before being rolled out to the public.
Many users were surprised by the style of this chat service – it seemed to almost be a step back in terms of technology and usability from MSN and Yahoo Messenger. This, however, was the plan of Facebook – to continue to offer a sleek and clean interface, which held (under the hood) the power that users needed to continue to keep in touch with each other and chat. After initial resistance, people embraced the new platform until billions of messages were being sent every single day. It was a phenomenon.
One small feature which seemed to be missing when chat was introduced was that of Facebook emoticons. Since the advent of ICQ and MSN more than a decade ago, people were used to being able to send small graphics and icons to their friends to represent their feelings and emotions – so where were they? The answer, of course, was that they were hidden! You could access these images, but you needed to learn the codes for inserting the symbols into your Facebook chats. So how could you find the different key press combinations to put them in your conversations? That was the hard part.
People tried different combos for days, trying to uncover all of the different permutations – and finally after a couple of weeks they were all found and listed online. Of course, people didn’t immediately look for them, but now we can see that the popularity of Facebook emoticons is such that theyre are hundreds of websites talking about them on the web (including this one!).
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